Olfactory Sense as an Object of Design Practice: Designing for an Emotional Experience in the Smart Technology Sector

OVERVIEW

Despite the mainstreaming of smart devices, user abandonment of these devices remains an unresolved challenge. It is easy to come across users who have stopped using their smart devices, whether it be a smart watch or a voice assistant. This study explores the olfactory sense as an object of design practice, examining how designers can use the olfactory sense to design for an emotional experience between a user and a smart device. It takes a research through design approach and uses a design experiment as a research method. It aims to investigate how olfactory stimulus and its interaction effect with visual stimulus influence the user’s emotional response during the interaction with an AI chatbot and the user’s willingness to continue to use an AI chatbot in the future.

Keywords:

• user abandonment
• smart device
• olfactory sense
• emotions
• design experiment

Note

Acknowledgements

This study is supervised by Dr. Ronald Jones and Dr. Nick Leon at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. Prof. Barry Smith and Harry Sherwood from the University of London have provided support for the execution of the scent experimentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A Wizard of Oz approach is a term coined by J.F. Kelley in 1980. It is often used in the experimental psychology, human factors, ergonomics, and usability engineering disciplines to describe a testing or iterative design methodology in which an experimenter (the Wizard) simulates the behaviour of a theoretical intelligent computer application (Kelley 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cecilia Lee

Cecilia is a PhD candidate in Service Design at the Royal College of Art in London, UK.